Notes & News
NOTES & NEWS Sadie Rose Weilerstein: K'tonton's Creator Still at Work "As a child, my closets were full of books," exclaims the diminutive author Sadie Rose Weilerstein, creator of The Adventures...
...This is the same process that Freud referred to as the 'dream work.'" In his introduction to the Guide, Maimonides told the reader "certain terms occurring in the books of prophecy...are equivocal [the same word has different meanings]....Others are derivative [the word derives from another word that holds the true meaning] ....Others are amphibolous [the terms are codewords for other words...
...Maimonides' Dream Analysis Has Similarities to Freud's The theme "Maimonides as Doctor and Scientist" will be emphasized at the Fourth International Symposium on Medicine in the Bible and Talmud, sponsored by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem's Faculty of Medicine October 29-31, 1990, in Jerusalem...
...And he v^as very much like my boy: He liked to hide and run and play...
...The patriarchs were prophets, too, according to Maimonides, who exempted only Moses' prophecy from dream analysis...
...At 96, still active, she continues to write poetry, children's stories and reminiscences...
...Maimonides assumed that the Biblical prophets reported dreams and visions, not actual events, says David Bakan, professor of psychology at York University in North York, Ontario, in Psychological Reports, April 1989...
...Maimonides, for example, cut Jacob's dream (Genesis 28:12-13) into segments, then suggested that the dream was a composite of subjects alluded to by words or phrases in the narrative...
...And behold a ladder set up on the earth, and so on...
...After Jacob wrestled with the angel and met Esau, Jacob said to God, "I am very, very small," meaning undeserving...
...Sometimes the next day I tear it up and throw it away, but many, many times I keep it and improve it...
...whatever comes into my head...it's called automatic writing," she says...
...There's another thing about K'tonton," she adds, "with my other children I can't tell them how to live...
...Then Maimonides deciphered the parts...
...Freud's theory is that the ordinary language used in reporting dreams is cryptogrammic...
...I said to my husband, 'What's a good name in Yiddish or Hebrew that means very, very little?'" Rabbi Weilerstein offered K'tonton...
...If...I put a dream before [a patient] cut up into pieces, he will give me a series of associations to each piece...
...She notes that aversion of the Hebrew word k 'tonton is used in the Bible (Genesis 32:11...
...The fundamental feature of interpretation is as a retracing of the process whereby the dream was created...
...The conception of K'tonton as told by Jonathan Sarna in "From K'tonton to the Torah," (see p. 44) is corroborated by Weilerstein...
...In this text, the word ladder indicates one subject...
...My family didn't have good voices," she recalls, so on Friday nights after the dinner, we would read...
...there is a deeper meaning contained in the apparent accidents of the letters and sounds of the language used in reporting dreams...
...But with K'tonton...
...Weilerstein's interest in storytelling tame from her parents...
...two— The Best of K'tonton (1980) and K'tonton in the Circus (1981)—are still available through the Jewish Publication Society...
...Jacob used the word k'tonti...
...My husband— Rabbi B. Reuben Weilerstein—was leading a story by Agnon about little (.adiel, a chasidic adult as big as a finger," she says...
...This mother to four, grandmother to five and great-grandmother to six says that she told her children all the stories long before they were written down...
...One of her most recent unpublished works, "A Great-Grandmother Remembers," touches on her near century of experiences and the changes she has seen in the world since her childhood in Rochester, New York...
...This is consistent with Maimonides' analysis...
...the words and the top of it reached to heaven indicate a third subject....Thus every word occurring in this parable refers to an additional subject in the complex of subjects represented by the parable as a whole...
...K'tonton appears in five books...
...They're grown up...
...It was fiction, but it was fiction based on true life," Weilerstein notes...
...NOTES & NEWS Sadie Rose Weilerstein: K'tonton's Creator Still at Work "As a child, my closets were full of books," exclaims the diminutive author Sadie Rose Weilerstein, creator of The Adventures of K'tonton (Women's League for Conservative Judaism, 1935) and 14 other children's books...
...When I can't sleep, I get up and I write...
...Weilerstein's son, Hershel, so loved tlie thumb-sized boy that was much like himself that he begged for more stories...
...When the Weilersteins went to Israel in 1955, a new K'tonton book soon followed, K'tonton in Israel (Women's League, 1964...
...I still see K'tonton now," Weilerstein adds...
...I didn't mean to write a book, but wherever I went I saw K'tonton...
...The method of dream interpretation] regards dreams from the very first as being of a composite character...
...My husband and I used to call him our fifth child," she says...
...The K'tonton stories' popularity can be attributed to the fact that his adventures are based on true life experiences of the Weilerstein family...
...They've got to live as they want to live...
...It's a hateful story about a blood accusation...
...Long before Freud, Maimonides, in The Guide of the Perplexed, developed similar dream-interpretaion methods to explain prophecy...
...Some books were Jewish, some weren't Jewish...
...Freud detailed his methodology this way: Our first step...teaches us that we must take as the object of our attention...not the dream as a whole but the separate portions of its content...
...the words set up on the earth indicate a second subject...
...He's very real to me, very real...
...First he broke up the text into parts to "overcome the uniting of different subjects into a coherent narrative that takes place in the formation of a dream or vision...
...Bakan says Maimonides' basic approach to analyzing dreams and visions was "to understand them in terms of the psychological processes whereby they were generated...
...And I couldn't tell my little boy about that, so I made up a sioryjust at that moment about a little boy as big as a finger...
...But then K'tonton didn't have a name, he was just the 'little one,'" recalls Weilerstein...
...Maimonides invoked two features that are harbingers of Freud's method of deciphering dreams...
...And his mother obliged...
...And you know her imagination is working...
Vol. 15 • October 1990 • No. 5
